I just joined the famous dating/matching website. It took me through a very meticulous questionnaire and I like it thinking, like everybody else that this is a sign of seriousness. It was my second attempt. First time, I had filled the form late in the night going to extremes: either a feature was very important for me, or not important at all… in the end they announced me that they have no match for me, that I should not feel bad, because 1 in 5 people get this result. Of course I felt bad (and since I met other people who got the same answer and they felt bad too) but then I laughed at it, thinking: “OMG, I am really bad if even eHarmony rejects me… but that means I am special”.
I called it MeHarmony after a fake commercial on SNL that was suggesting that what people are looking for and finding is a duplicate of them in the opposite sex. While I don’t think that it’s the case, I noticed that in profiles listed on other dating websites that it is true: people look not to be completed and balanced by the partner but a totally identical image of themselves. This, now I realize, is another argument to my main point of this post: eHarmony, while very good in its intentions, is based on an assumption that is generally false… and no matter who good their process is from that point forward, the result will be tainted.
MeHarmony process could match people but only if they would be honest. Users are being told that there is no right or wrong so they should answer honestly. Most of them truly BELIEVE that they are being honest. From my experience though, people cannot be honest for a simple reason: being honest would mean that they know and accept that they have defects, some being big ones. No matter what is being told, introspection to know oneself and accepting the conclusions, no matter how unfavorable they might for one is not something people do. People want to feel good about them even when they have no real reasons. They are so desperate to believe that they are intelligent, kind, generous, patient that they lie, mostly to themselves. And what a better lie is there but the one you honestly believe to be the truth?! Once you managed to fool yourself, automatically you will be able to fool everyone else, especially and automated system like the one eHarmony makes available.
I remember that when I was a kid and got a bad grade or needed to hide something from my parents, I would cycle in my mind tens or even hundreds of time the lie… until that would somewhat make it true in my mind – with details and ramifications, just like the truth. I remember I saw killers that were proven without a shadow of a doubt, still denying any involvement and taking the truth even beyond the grave – and I believe they are convinced that it is the truth they speak. I know people who spend themselves silly, every penny, are in deep debt but still continue to argue that they are savvy people because they drive 10 km to save 2$ on an item. I know people who eat themselves to death but then say “I am eating so little and I still cannot lose weight”.
I always process information from stories seen or read and I identify myself with one character or another one – and to myself it doesn’t matter if that character is good or bad. At the same time, I had the chance (?) to share with somebody a documentary about OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).. The person had pretty much all the symptoms displayed by the focus of the documentary. After a few days, putting a little bit of distance from the fresh emotions, I asked the person if she can identify herself with that character… and to my surprise and hers – I could read that in her wide-open eyes – she said “There is no resemblance between me and that person”. I was flabbergasted and only then I realized how far people will go to avoid accepting their flaws.
What are my flaws? Oh, quite a few and I described them clearly on eHarmony questionnaire. I have short patience – I trained it and I provide signs that it’s running out, but it’s still shorter that the average. I need a partner who can be honest and when they made a mistake can admit it so we can discuss how we can avoid it in the future (even by not doing a thing one doesn’t have the aptitudes to do it). It’s not easy to admit you are wrong but I taught myself to do the very same thing. I am focused and I need my space now and then, so clinging to me and calling me every 1h at work will make me run out of patience. I am not kind and I sometimes tell the truth (it’s better than years back when I would always tell the truth, required or not, delicate but mostly not) – now I fought with myself and, unless you really annoy me, even when I say it I try to adopt a form less aggressive. I don’t like surprises – good or bad… sounds crazy not to like good surprises, eh? That is because I go by planning and when plans are broken that doesn’t make me feel good, so I need some time for adjustment in my mind, for realization that it’s good, that we can work it out. If my nerves are tried out by someone, after a while, I end up saying extremely hurtful things which, sometimes, might be the truth but are still hurtful and the choice of words can hit hard people. It’s after a while and only if I am being poked hard. I don’t suffer criticism if it’s “in your face” (one might say I can’t swallow my own medicine) but if there is merit, when I calm down I will acknowledge not only by deed but by words as well the truth of that criticism.
Well, the previous paragraph could be seen as an argument to what I was saying – I find myself excuses for all my flaws. I believe that they are not excuses but that they are true, the result of many years of finding out my flaws and working on them… but then again, maybe I am lying to myself so well that I have no chance in knowing the truth.
Articles from August 2009
Just sunshine, wind and speed
If one reads my blog would be left with the idea that all I do is bitching… and it would an approximately correct impression. I wish I was blind, I wish I could simply enjoy life and not care what other people do or think… but that would just not be me. I always envied and blamed my father for having a quality that enhanced his life: being oblivious at everything that went around him. He would tell me often “Why do you get in fights with your mom? Can’t you just do like me: get a face appropriate with the topic, nod and just think about your projects and things you want to accomplish?” Well, the answer is NO. Now I know why – he probably has Asperger Syndrome, just like my son – and what he thought it was a developed trait it’s an inborn one. The only solution for me to be like him would be living on a desert island… and, with my luck, probably dying of appendicitis or something trivial, before I can get to a doctor. And yes – I used to blame him for withdrawing in his inner mind and letting me to deal alone with my mother’s nagging and dissatisfaction.
But no more bitching! Life is – as I often describe – interesting. No, you “shinny happy people” it’s not beautiful – sometimes is sad, other times is tumultuous, in spots is dramatic or happy… but it’s damn interesting.
Recently, as most of my friends know, I purchased a motorcycle. I had some money I was getting back from a credit card, the time is right and prices were very convenient, motorcycles attract women and I am a single dude… so I didn’t honestly was on the edge of my seat due to impatience. I was thinking also about all the hassle for the rider’s license, high-insurance for a new rider so I had my doubts. You imagine my doubts when, after a break of 13 years from the last time I rode, I had to take my new motorcycle home – I was yellow with fear, spun around a close-by parking lot until people thought I was crazy. But then it all came back to me… from the mist of my lost youth (don’t tell me that you found it!) the joy, the exhilaration of being in the wide open, fighting the wind, leaning in curves… I find it hard to describe the happiness that after just 1-2 days dawned onto me.
I was amazed how a simple object – I never believed in buying happiness – could bring so much pleasure, confidence in what is and what will be, and sheer happiness. When I sold my motorcycle – I think it was 98 – it was just like all my dreams of adventure, of open spaces, of the world being my shell had ended. I remember that when my ex would try to talk me into having a child I would tell her: “There is no 3rd seat on the motorcycle”… and then I would bend under the burden of my selfishness. And yet I sold it for all the correct reasons: I am a married man, I can’t kill myself, it’s not practical, it’s not comfortable. When I came to Canada, I flirted somewhat with the idea… but then I gave up. I used to joke (somewhat bitterly): “You know how I figured out that I am getting old? When I came to Canada my wish-list was: 1. Motorcycle; 2. Boat. Then I thought about the wind, the rain, the hassle… and I compared with the tranquility of the boat on an empty lake… and the new order has become: 1. Boat, 2. Motorcycle”. If I was true then, maybe it’s true now and maybe I found the perfect time-travel machine: the motorcycle. When I zoom across empty roads, my mind takes me back to the University’s campus where friends and I used to loiter on a fence and watch the spring wind blow up the girls’ skirts… It takes me back to a time where there were no deadlines, no real obligations or responsibilities. And then I leave the city and get in the middle of nowhere and the cool evening sends in my helmet the smell of “sinziiene” – flowers my grandfather had in the country side… and of dung… In a blink of an eye I am back to my childhood and all those enormous days of summer that ended in a story and listening to politics on a radio with lamps. And these memories are more like feelings than thoughts because I have to stay focused on the road ahead, scouring for rocks or potholes or some animal that might came out the woods.
If somebody thinks that I made a bad investment, think how much you would be willing to spend to be young again?! It’s all there, bottled in that V2 engine and it gets released into my body as I’m sprinting amidst the orange shadows of the sunset.
Yes, it’s true that after 1h of riding my buttocks are starting to get numb, I have a stabbing pain in my back but I simply cannot thing about them.
I am simply happy again. Not as happy as I could be if everything would be perfect in my life but enough to make days at least bearable if not even more enjoyable. I normally go to bed late and wake relatively early and that makes me somewhat grumpy. Now I am going to work with a smile on my face because I get to ride my motorcycle (although the morning rush can be quite unnerving).
Many people are asking me “Aren’t you afraid? So many accidents”. I am afraid – less now that when I purchased it but still the anxiety is somewhat high. Still, I ask rhetorical – why do only things that you are comfortable with? How can we become with new things, feelings, actions if we don’t experience them ever? I like challenges. Just like I love to do only complicated, presumably impossible things in my job, I also try to face any fear that my mind or my body flutters in me.
Yes, I am aware it’s still early to make long-term judgments. It might be that in 1-2 years the rain, the cold, the insurance or even a wipeout, would show me that motorcycle is not really for me. But then I will be able to lay in its grave my youth dream without regrets, love it and remember it if for what it was – a whim of crazy youth – instead of carrying it inside me as a frustration: oh, I could have been so happy if only I had the guts/the money/the X to do it.
I’m going back on my steps and maybe it’s not so wrong to look for happiness in things.
Brain – an obsolete tool
I know that I am what could be called “The Voice of Doom” but I believe that society needs people like me. Following the traditions of SciFi and distopic writers I try to show the world how bad it could be, marketed in a coherent social image. Most of the time it doesn’t really help or at least not in the short run because society has such a huge inertia. Beside that, people who, in this time of happiness, still bother reading such dark scenarios… or simply bother reading, don’t really need to be told about it because they can probably make up for themselves the society I am writing about. For those, let’s just say that I am simply adding up all the markers and unify the big picture.
Yes, the brain becomes a more and more obsolete tool. What has began as a way to enhance our lives, to free more of our time for our pleasures and to allow us to pursue the happiness, has metamorphosed into a race for removing the daily functions of our brain.
Now, let us sustain this. We use GPSes to navigate our way not only in unfamiliar surroundings but in environments that should be/become familiar, like our own cities, large or small. I met quite a few people who, after living more than 5 years in a place, still can’t name the major streets and boulevards or even highways of their town/city. At the store, the machines add, and subtract and even the change to be given/received is computed from the bills handed. In general we don’t do this and is difficult to explain to children why they should memorize the multiplication table, as long as we don’t. We don’t read and instead watch TV because images speak more than 1000 words, are easily digested. Even so, it seems that with the increase of technical quality of our TVs, the intellectual content of the programming and of movies has decreased. We have PDAs and organizers and “intelligent” cellphones that can remember the telephone numbers so that all we need to remember is “John” or “Mary”. Even guessing time instinct is quite lost since we have so many sources of finding out time. A search engine can retrieve information in a matter of seconds and children know this better than anyone, since many teachers advise them to use Google for their homework. Not so many years ago, that very same information would have taken weeks of research, a number of books read and so on – now it’s received instantaneously in a pre-digested form and students never manage to grasp the idea that education requires effort. Started as a current against the dumb memorization process of the past, the educational process now moved into the other extreme, of considering memorization a totally futile tool, even when it comes to multiplication table or the national anthem.
This advantage, of having information at our disposal, lead many people to consider that there is no necessity to store it in our brain. Just like we don’t store water in wells because we have running water, we ended up by not remembering personalities names, dates, pretty much anything that is worth remembering. As a normal consequence of this excessive “offer” process, the value of the information has decreased and the “demand” has decreased. If you can find anything, anytime, anywhere, what is the point of storing it and – mostly – processing it?
Going back to another post – many people are against using the word “STUPID”. What they fail to perceive is that using less and less our minds, we DO become STUPID, individual after individual, and – eventually – as a society! Just by not talking about it is simply pushing the problem under the rug.
The Perfect Life Partner
Yes, yes, I know, there is no perfect partner. Still, as Robin Williams says in Good Will Hunting: “… she’s not perfect. Neither are you. What matters is if you are perfect for each other”. This material is trying to take a snapshot of somebody who would be perfect for ME. Why am I writing it? Just so I clear my mind, visualize my expectations and, when doing so, understand if they are realistic or not. Everyone seems to know what they don’t want but that is really not very helpful in the quest for a partner. Like always, I am trying to be different.
To figure out the answer to “how would your ideal partner look and behave like” I started by trying to find out who I am, what I can live with and what I cannot live without. Everyone looks for unconditional love – and I agree that this is how true love is. But how does one reach unconditional love? You meet somebody, go out on a few dates, share some laughs and have a good time in the sack and there you go: unconditional love?! It doesn’t make sense. It just dawned onto me – as I was writing these lines – that the road to unconditional love is through conditional one. At least for me. I am dual – a down-to-earth person and a dreamer locked within the same body. Through some unsuccessful experiences, I discovered that the perfect love, in my case, would have to address both my mind and my soul. Only when I will be have them agree, I will know that I met a long-lasting relationship.
Conditional love?! So what are these conditions that should be fulfilled? Only the person involved knows because for each of us the conditions are different: for some perfect beauty is the condition, for others success, for others intelligence or kindness but, in most cases, a mixture of all of these, in different percentage. When these conditions are met and solidified using the cement of time, only then unconditional love appears.
It took me a while to understand that respect and admiration is one the most important for me in a relationship. I want to receive them but – at least as important – I want to be able to offer them to my partner and have good reasons for doing it so. Well, pretty much everyone demands respect these days but, unfortunately, very few are ready to do something to gain it. I had myself a hard time understanding and accepting that respect is earned and not given. Moreover it is hardly gained and easily lost. I know with certainty that respect and admiration for the one who accompanies me in life would make me be the best I can be. I accomplished many things but I know I can accomplish even more if only I would have somebody close-by that I can look up to. I don’t like inter-relationship competition but, as a fact, I always try to meet the standards my partner lives up to (not those my partner would want to impose on me without imposing them on themselves). If those standards are low, I find very little motives to push me forward.
Of course, respect and admiration are very general. What raises respect in one person, could not make another one blink. I gained the respect of my mother by simply proving myself capable of doing house-chores: cooking from scratch, cleaning the house, washing and ironing clothes. For years and years I had many excellent accomplishments that few people can boast and yet they didn’t mean anything for her. Suddenly I do something that pretty much any responsible adult should be able to do and I am raised on a pedestal.
So what is that I do respect and admire?! I admire true fighters – people who know what they want in life and want reasonable things and find the power not to wine for not having them but work hard to get it and somehow manage to still remain moral. Trivial? Most people would like to think so because they think highly of themselves. Personally, I am not convinced this is a quality easy to find. People want better homes, better cars, better vacations, and better family life but very seldom do they want to create the basis for this: better themselves. I take pride in my work and, as such, I respect more a janitor who does his work impeccably than a PhD who didn’t learn anything new in a number of years. We all have things that we are not capable of doing but we can’t know that for sure unless we gave it our BEST try.
I believe that a strong partner can motivate one to raise the bar for himself too (or so it should be). Like a competition. Not an unhealthy one – many times partners compare salaries or other sordid matters as a base for the internal competition and that leads to many issues. I usually say that for me envy is a positive feeling: whenever I envy somebody for their accomplishments, I do not deny those accomplishments but my mind starts working about what I can do to match those accomplishments I admire. Self-satisfaction can be as destructive as never being content – and not only on oneself but in his close ones as well. What is the point of pushing you forward when doing this just increases the fault line between the two partners? And if you do push yourself forward, the trench that separates the two will become insurmountable.
Without being a snob about it, I am a person of relatively good taste. It’s not something I did educate or actively sought to become. It just so happened. I accept the evaluation of what constitute refine things is relative but there are some accepted guidelines. Sometimes, like in literature or when it comes to movies and sometimes in art, I can verbalize my choice. Other times – like in the cases where I am less educated – such as wine and wine tasting, it’s instinctive. Actually I kind of hate snobs, the real ones, the ones who think that expensive is better, the ones who can never achieve a personal opinion but just take it from critics… not the other archetype that the pop culture pushed onto us: people who have good table manner, who are educated and so on.
Lack of any good or at least genuinely interesting taste in culture and education is, definitively, a put-off for me and I would not see myself sharing my life with a person with whom I cannot share artistic feelings, impressions – I say share, not communicate because I yearn for conversation, not monologues. And yes, my partner’s taste don’t have to be totally similar to mine – although a common ground would be helpful – but they need to be somewhat supported in the great scheme of things. I would definitely appreciate someone who can initiate me in new areas of culture, music, food etc. I realize now that I am looking in a person the same quality that I am looking for in art/cultural products: novelty, inspiration, insight, not repetition.
Speaking about taste, I believe one tragedy of the world currently is the continuous search for comfort. I am not the one to despise the comfort under normal circumstances but when it comes to wearing flip-flops in a good restaurant, putting the legs on the table in the same restaurant, going in pajamas to the bus station, walking bare-feet through the office… I believe some of us are going too far in this search for comfort. This all boils down to there is a time and a place for everything but not every time and place are suitable for something.
I also found out about myself that while I am a dreamer, I am still anchored very much in reality. I live on this Earth and if I wrote SciFi or fantasy it means I like to speculate not that I believe in such. I have little tolerance on people who try to meet ET, who believe that crystals are a cure to anything, who believe that the cure for cancer is in the possession of some dude in Kirghizstan and it’s not released just because a huge conspiracy of the pharmaceutical companies. Exploration of these topics, speculations I can sustain but once I feel that there is belief I back down especially because, from my personal experience, I know it’s not a single “birdie” flying up there but a whole nest of them. In other words, I am looking for some common sense. Yes, I know that common sense is not so common but I would nevertheless try to find some. To be honest, reading this I am wondering if I have common sense: somebody who have common sense would probably accept quickly when they do something out of range, while somebody who doesn’t have common sense would never admit to such a fault. Yet, still, I know I can judge somebody who doesn’t have common sense: if you believe that you are saving when you buy useless or seldom of use objects when they are in sale, you don’t have common sense; if you constantly believe that the others are in the wrong, if you don’t see (or admit) when you are at fault, then you don’t have common sense; if you keep on doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result, you don’t have common sense…
All in all I’m not asking much from my partner – just the impossible: a strong person (not a stubborn, or yelling one), with a decent taste in all that makes this life worth living, based on a solid common sense and that’s it… And please, before you swear at me, remember – I never demanded more than I can offer.